


the way you hurt me

by TheBrokaryotes



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: ):, ????? goodbye, Other, also known as i just wrote this in an hour and a half and, and he accidentally goes to kanekis house, and ya, ghoul!Hide, hide is a ghoul, hide was going home from a hunt, kaneki is not, so swapped au i guess, um theres blood and stuff so yeah, where he got mauled
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:26:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBrokaryotes/pseuds/TheBrokaryotes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hide’s been a ghoul for his and Kaneki’s whole life. Kaneki doesn’t seem to know, and Hide intends to keep it that way. Kaneki’s one of his only friends, and he couldn’t fathom hurting him like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way you hurt me

**Author's Note:**

> um  
> yeah sooooooo  
> guess what TheBrokaryotes started watching this weekend  
> (tbh √a is awful)  
> um so yeah i started this at 9:20 and finished at 10:40 so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> hope u guys enjoy!! comments are greatly appreciated <3

The earth wobbles and shrinks back from Hideyoshi’s footfalls, the walls of buildings around him bending and warping away from him even as he reaches out and tries to touch them, grab onto them, hold himself steady while he tries to keep his insides on the inside with his right hand. He can feel his stomach wound slowly closing, mending skin struggling to repair itself. Hide moves a lethargic finger, and he swears he feels it brush across an organ or two. He almost wretches, but he keeps his gaze, albeit marred and murky, on the sidewalk.

Where was he going? Home. There was coffee at home. The primal side of him flares up in irritation; coffee would do him no good, and he knew it. He couldn’t regenerate on that alone, he needed something even more basic.

_People. I need a human._

Stumbling and falling, a generous brick wall catches him and cradles his side as he gathers his limbs under him and stands up again. Hissing between his teeth, Hide forces one foot in front of the other. He was running on autopilot now, he could feel his breath giving out. He would be lucky if he made it to the stairs.

_Stairs? Stairs. Climb the stairs, step inside._

The stairs are arduous. Damn things, appearing out of nowhere. Why is he trying to climb them? _Where am I going?_ he muses half-mindedly, blinking into the darkness.

The sliver of strength left in Hide’s body flutters off with the sweet spring breeze that washes over his face, and he finally drops to the ground, watching it spiral up to meet him in a not-so-gentle manner. His hand twitches where it rests, pressed against flesh and muscle and ligaments and things that should never have touched the air.

His hand twitches, and he grows still, staring at two parallel lines opening into shadow before his eyes shut.

A moment of shrill silence as the ringing in his ears grows dull.

A moment of the silence, until his body is jostled again, a high-pitched chattering sound like a symphony of bats meeting his ears and yanking his poor beaten soul back out of the ether.

“Hide! _Hide_ , wake up! Hide!”

A moan drags like a knife across Hide’s ribcage as his body is turned over. His face turns toward the sky, cool air hitting his cheeks and threatening to pry his eyes open. Arms hook under his shoulders, crossing to the front of his chest and heaving him up with effort. He can barely feel the gritty cement under his legs as he’s dragged someplace, over a tiny lip of metal, carpet rubbing on his thighs until he’s dropped. The sound of a door closing and more ceaseless chatter rush to him and engulf him almost as fully as the darkness.

The darkness, and the _scent._

The scent of something warm and homely, something eerily familiar and yet strange, as is the common scent of human skin. It’s close. It’s all around him. 

_I need it. I need it._

The scent evades him, and the familiar carnal fire of his blood rushing to the surface of his skin fills him, pulsing and giving him the courage to open his eyes and turn onto his side with some effort.

His surroundings are certainly familiar; he’s been here before. He knows this place almost as certainly as he knows the back of his hand, knows where he needs to move to take down the target, the _food_ that crouches, across the room in the kitchen, with its head turned slightly to look back at him.

“Hide? I’m getting gauze. Try not to move, okay?”

The voice haunts him, thumps at the logical portion of his brain, but Hide shakes it off, the electric sensation of his eyes shifting and his strength surging back engulfing him.

Two strides on all fours is all it takes to close the distance between him and regeneration, in the form of hot skin between his teeth, warm blood gushing across his tongue and his gums, filling him and thrilling him. _Yes, yes, yes…!_

Hide freezes as a choke – not his own – breaks the beautiful silence of his feast.

Not his own, and yet he could feel it. He knew the noise, knew who it belonged to, and couldn’t bring himself to do anything but sit, hands pressed against two narrows shoulders, legs clamped at the sides of this poor human’s hips, keeping it pinned to the cabinets under the kitchen sink.

“H-Hide,” Kaneki murmurs, and Hide wants to die all over again, wants to eat and cry all at once, wants the pain to go away but remain, to punish him properly for taking a bite out of his best friends shoulder.

Two hands, soft and gentle, come to rest at the side of Hide’s head, and he almost gasps at how gently their fingers thread through his blonde hair, likely caked with blood and dirt. They curl and scrape against his scalp, but he couldn’t care less if it hurts. They move, and push his head further down into Kaneki’s shoulder, forcing fresh blood to trickle up and fill Hide’s mouth again, his senses flaring.

“Take what you need,” Kaneki whispers, obviously holding back tears and garbled groans of pain, and Hide’s heart wells with pain akin to his mouth with blood. Remorsefully, he nurses the wound, swallowing what he had already taken and lapping at the red lacing the exposed muscle.

When he pulls away, the throbbing ache in his stomach pales in comparison to that in his chest, and he keeps his eyes trained on the floor, not even allowing himself to look in Kaneki’s direction. The other boy’s fingers are still in his hair, still keeping him anchored to the reality that he had attacked his best friend, taken a chunk out of him, and Kaneki had _allowed_ him to continue.

There are no words, not even prior to Kaneki shifting underneath Hide carefully and pushing himself up onto his own two feet, holding his shoulder as he walks off. Hide remains catatonic, internal turmoil enough.

The only words that come are from Kaneki, and its only after he’s come back from the bathroom with a wet towel on his shoulder and another draped over his arm. He kneels down in front of Hide and waits patiently with a hand outstretched for the blonde ghoul to reach out and take the cloth, pressing it against his stomach and wincing.

“I’m not upset,” Kaneki mutters, back to the cabinets again as he slides down to sit beside Hide. “In case you thought I might be.”

Hide doesn’t want to laugh, even though it’s utterly ridiculous how nonchalant Kaneki is being. _Idiot, how can you not be upset?_ he wants to snap. _Aren’t you scared? Aren’t you at least a little concerned that I bit you? That I'm a ghoul?_

“In a way, I guess, I kind of already knew?” Kaneki ventures, keeping his voice relatively hush, tone the magic kind that echoes calmness and collection even in times of distress. “Not for sure, obviously. But it doesn’t surprise me.”

Hide has to latch to that. “How so?” His voice is much more hoarse than he thought it would be.

“Your manner, you know? Just you. You know so much, you can tell everything about someone just by standing with them for a few moments. That kind of vigilance and discernment doesn’t come from someone who doesn’t have to practice it to survive somehow. You’re fiery but tempered, like you know the balance between aggression and seriousness. You have to know it, you have to balance out your attitude when your…” Kaneki makes a gesture that indicates there’s more to the sentence but he goes quiet.

 _Hungry_ , Hide finishes in his head, the pit in his gut widening and sucking out even more of his hope. Again, he fixes his gaze on the floor.

“Hide,” Kaneki ventures. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I’m not moving,” Hide insists, but he knows thats not what Kaneki meant.

The ravenette smiles weakly. “I mean don’t blame yourself. In your own time, I’m sure you’ll tell me what happened, but I know you, and I know you wouldn’t have…hurt me, not unless you needed to. Or unless you had no control over it.”

Kaneki understood more than Hide had thought he would. He glances up, into those murky brown eyes that hid all the wonders of a genius in them, and he cracks, tears finally bursting like water over a broken dam as he falls to Kaneki’s chest, bawling and wheezing his sorrow into the threads of the cotton shirt he wore. Kaneki’s hands are back to his hair, calming him and bringing him back to a place where he can breath without crying out, a place where ragged gasps are replaced with gentle sighs and the occasional hyperventilation scare.

When sleep comes, its rapid and undeserved, but it envelops Hide like second death, and for a moment, he feels hope; Kaneki understood, and if he understood, then they could both live.

If only all things were so simple in the life of a born murderer.


End file.
